Johan Santana didn’t throw the first no-hitter for the New York Mets. Armando Galarraga owns one of 24 perfect games in major league history.

These would be facts if baseball was governed by golf logic, where outcomes aren’t final until every rules jockey with a remote control has an opportunity to review the results. This is golf’s reality, and it is slightly absurd.

The events of Friday evening—which extended well into Saturday morning—at the Masters turned the spotlight on golf’s reality, and it wasn’t a favorable glow.

The controversy happened on the 15th hole, when Tiger Woods’ approach shot hit the flagstick and bounded cruelly into the water. He took a drop that was deemed legal when the rules committee, acting on a tip from a television viewer, reviewed the play before the end of his round.

In every other sport, what happens on the field of play is absolute. It doesn’t matter that Jim Joyce admitted that he blew the controversial call at first base at the end of Galarraga’s gem, or that Santana could admit that Carlos Beltran’s line drive down the left-field line wasn’t really foul.

“Well, I went down to the drop area, that wasn't going to be a good spot, because obviously it's into the grain, it's really grainy there. And it was a little bit wet. So it was muddy and not a good spot to drop. So I went back to where I played it from, but I went two yards further back and I took, tried to take two yards off the shot of what I felt I hit. And that should land me short of the flag and not have it either hit the flag or skip over the back. I felt that that was going to be the right decision to take off four right there. And I did. It worked out perfectly.”

Well, perfectly at the time. But the rules committee was listening, and based on those post-round comments, they decided to re-re-open the ruling. It was determined that Woods didn’t drop in the right spot, and in accordance with a rule put into place in 2012, he was given a two-stroke penalty on Saturday morning instead of being disqualified.

And because it’s 2013, Woods accepted the penalty publicly on Twitter. Here are his five tweets, combined for clarity: “At hole #15, I took a drop that I thought was correct and in accordance with the rules. I was unaware at that time I had violated any rules. I didn’t know I had taken an incorrect drop prior to signing my scorecard. Subsequently, I met with the Masters Committee Saturday morning and was advised they had reviewed the incident prior to the completion of my round. Their initial determination was that there was no violation, but they had additional concerns based on my post-round interview. After discussing the situation with them this morning, I was assessed a two-shot penalty. I understand and accept the penalty and respect the Committees’ decision.”

Shortly after the committee’s ruling, the calls for Woods to withdraw started to gain steam. He’d signed his post-round scorecard with a score that was deemed correct at the time but was changed Saturday morning, which meant the scorecard with his signature was suddenly incorrect.

The rules committee didn’t think so—hence the two-stroke penalty—but other golfers chimed in on Twitter saying he should have been DQ’d, and the Golf Channel’s morning programming was dominated by much of that same thought.

It was about the “integrity of the game” and other such things.

There is something magical about the aura of the Masters, no doubt, but no matter what Jim Nantz tries to sell you, there is nothing magical about the competition. Golf is no “better” than any other sport; these are athletes striving for the ultimate prize in their sport, trying to beat the pressure, outperform their competitors and conquer the conditions.